Fears grow for children as slave ship docks

A suspected slave ship missing off the coast of west Africa carrying around 180 children docked in the capital of Benin, Cotonou, early this morning.

Port sources said there appeared to be only seven children on board, but a full search of the ship was being carried out.

The Nigerian-registered ship had been spotted on Sunday in the straits between Malabo, in Equatorial Guinea, and Douala, in Cameroon.

The situation was thrown into confusion last night when a Benin government minister claimed the MV Etireno was not carrying any children and had been mistaken for another vessel. The social protection minister Ramatou Baba Moussa could not provide the name or location of the second ship.

Benin had appealed for international help to track down the Etireno, as it only has five small navy patrol vessels.

It has been at sea since March 30, when it set sail from Cotonou headed for Gabon, where it was refused permission to dock. It was feared the children may have been offloaded at a remote port in Nigeria or even thrown overboard.

Unicef said it feared what the Etireno's captain - a man with a criminal record who has been accused of trafficking child slaves in the past - might do to evade arrest.

"When we heard that [the captain] has a criminal past, we imagined the worst, and the worst is that they could have been thrown overboard," Nicholas Pron, a Unicef official based in Benin, said.

Even if the children remained aboard the ship, their food and water could have run out. The Etireno refuelled in Douala last Thursday, but port authorities there said it was short of food even then and some of the children looked ill.

Benin police yesterday issued arrest warrants through Interpol for the captain and crew, and for three businessmen. The businessmen, led by Stanislas Abatan, are accused of transporting hundreds of children to work in Gabon's cocoa and rubber plantations.

The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, has instructed US diplomats in west Africa to "do everything possible" to assist authorities in finding and dealing with the ship.

His spokesman said that the help was likely to take the form of an "exchange of information", adding that embassy staff throughout the region were working on the case.